Write Music According to the State of Your Career (?)

I consciously and willingly decided to slow down or even sabotage my own career. At least according to a few composers and mentors that I was talking to during my early years of pursuing this career. And they might have been right. From my current point of view I would probably even tell my younger self the same thing.

But let's back up a bit here. One of the strikingly simple career advices is to write music that is suitable for the type of projects that you are likely to expect at the current state of your career. Beginning composers are not likely to get projects that require a full symphonic orchestra or an epic trailer wall of sound but more likely to be asked for projects that are considerably smaller in scale. So in order to acquire such projects that are likely to come your way, it would be advisable to have demo tracks available that would be suitable for the scale and scope of such projects.

Yet, when you scroll through websites of many composers who just start out in this world you get a lot of Hollywood imitations. Large scale orchestral hero fanfares, epic battle sequences with choir or even rescores of Hollywood movie sequences.

And I was (or am) not an exception to this. The first orchestral piece that I wrote was a clear imitation of Hollywood scoring genres for full symphony orchestra, and going from there full orchestra line-ups used in a Hollywood kind of way was my default. Even though I was lacking the writing chops to handle it properly or the technical capabilities to simulate an orchesta convincingly, I didn't question for a minute that this was the way that I should write music. I was lacking the mental connection between what I was writing and what potential paying clients would be needing. So the only projects I had were students and amateurs who were under the same impression that they could film Hollywood grade battle scenes with their friends in their backyard with their dad's camera.

Only when I entered music university, I started to question this attitude, or rather my teachers and profs started to question it first. The general consensus that they had and that is being taught is: start with small line ups and small scale pieces and when you mastered those you can start increasing bit by bit.

So I was forced to scale down my writing and learn all the ins and outs but I can not really say that I enjoyed that alot. It felt like painting only with the color yellow. But I really tried to adapt more to the needs of my career at that time. I wrote music that was minimalistic, with some synthetic elements, small lineups etc., just the kind of stuff that is likely to work in projects that I would be expecting at this point in my career.

But then two things happened. The first one was that I felt like I was losing the joy in writing music. This was also based on the academic structures of the music university that I felt pressured me into being more "avantgarde" with my writing which I really didn't enjoy. But it was also down to the fact that I did that "career appropriate" diversification. I got some "paid" (in quotes because it was just a bit of money for a lot of work) jobs by doing that but it really started to wear me down. I felt like all that excitement and fascination that brought me into music was gone and replaced by "getting shit done" and "trying to earn something with it".

The second reason was that I was lucky enough to be hired on some projects that were fortunate follow ups of my "hollywood phase" from earlier that allowed me and even required me to work with real orchestra and large line-ups so I gladly went with it.

And fortunately, the latter one developed into a stable career that allows me to go along with writing mostly orchestral music for large line-ups.

I honestly wouldn't know what I would be doing now if that didn't happen back then as I'm not sure if I would have followed through with writing music that was more "career appropriate". 

And even with the career I am having now and that I'm quite happy with, especially regarding its development in the past few years, I am relatively sure that I could be way further along with it by now, if I had given in more to the current trends and targeted more towards music that is appropriate for my career. It's not that I'm scoring blockbuster after blockbuster with full orchestral music currently but film projects that require me to go "all in" are still relatively rare for me. So I think that I could have attracted more projects if my style of writing was more compatible with the current trends and scope of the projects to expect.

However, I thoroughly do enjoy projects where I can wander off from the symphonic line-up, like the short film A FATHER'S JOB that I did last year or the Woodwind Quintet pieces that I wrote for the Orchestra Discovery Session for this Patreon a few months ago, but I always feel like the orchestra is "my home".

But still, I would give every composer who is just starting out the advice to focus on music that is likely to work with their current career state, because these lucky coincidences that happened to me are definitely not sure to happen to everybody. For me, it was a conscious decision to follow a career that is mostly focused on full orchestral music but if you find happiness and artistic satisfaction beyond that in a commercially more promising career path, you should definitely nurture that and follow along.